"Hey!" Remo said, snatching it from midair between two fingers. "Watch what you're doing to my mother. This is the only picture I have of her."
"That is not your mother."
"Look again. She has Freya's eyes. Or Freya has her eyes."
Chiun peered at the drawing, which Remo held up at a safe distance from the Master's sharp fingernails.
"Pah!" said Chiun. "Coincidence. Besides, you describe the eyes you wished to see. It is a fragment of your imagination."
"That's 'figment.' And this morning you were convinced I saw my mother's ghost."
"This morning I was beside myself with worry over the gold. Now I am serene in the knowledge that it is safe from the confiscators because it is being protected by the greatest assassin to walk the earth since the days of the Great Wang."
"I want to show this to Smith."
"Why?"
"Maybe he can help me find who this face belongs to.
"If she is dead, what good would that do?"
"I don't know. All I know is that Smith owes me and I mean to collect."
"Very well. I have business with Smith, as well."
"You bring him out of it yet?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I know that he will do himself in if I restore to him the means to do it."
"Good point. We gotta find a way to get Smith back behind his computer terminal so he doesn't take himself off."
"It will not be easy," squeaked Chiun, taking the stairs with his hands clasped before him, concealed by the joined sleeves of his kimono.
Chapter 10
Harold Smith lay in the darkness, cursing the darkness.
Folcroft was quiet. The night shift moved past his door, down the two-tone green corridors with the slow, shuffling feet of zombies. No light came through the chinks in the door frame, so in his hospital room Smith lay in darkness, unmoving.
He still could not move, except to open and close his eyes. His stomach churned. The ulcers that had tormented him for years were flaring up, the result of the strain of the past week.
There was no doubt in Smith's active mind that CURE was through. It was ironic. Only a week before, he had, through his vast resources and superior mind, outwitted one of CURE's most implacable foes. The Friend operation designed to destroy CURE had nearly succeeded. Smith had blocked it, countered it, then smashed it utterly.
It was one of his greatest victories-measured by how close to the brink the supersecret organization had all come.
In the end it turned out to be a temporary respite from a plan that continued beyond the grave of its originator.
By now Folcroft must have been turned upside down in the IRS's blind determination to uncover Folcroft's supposed illicit secrets. In ordinary times there would have been so little to uncover. The secret terminal in Smith's desk. The computers, rendered mute and forever dumb by the Superwipe Program. Nothing more. He had run a totally paperless office. The true secrets of CURE were stored in his own perishable brain.
But there was the gold in the basement. Even if Remo and Chiun had been able to remove their portion, Smith's own would remain. It amounted to several million dollars in pure bullion. Millions in gold ingots in a sealed room in the basement of a sleepy private hospital, while American citizens were forbidden by law from owning gold except in the form of jewelry.
There was no way to explain all that gold away.
So Smith lay in darkness, cursing the darkness and wishing-actually willing-his heart to stop beating.
And without warning, the darkness around him seemed to swell.
At first Smith thought it a trick of the irredeemable darkness.
It was too dark for shadows. He might as well have been set in a block of breathable basalt.
But the blackness swelled on either side of his hospital bed, even though his frantic, darting eyes couldn't make the shapes resolve. His rimless glasses lay on the side table. Without them, the universe was a painful blur.
A light flicked on, blinding him.
And over the needle of pain in his brain, he heard a voice.
"Hiyah, Smitty."
Remo!
"Greetings, Harold the Resolute."
And Master Chiun.
"If we let you sit up," Remo was asking, "will you promise not to make a fuss? Blink twice for yes."
Smith was still trying to get his eyes to stop blinking from the sudden light. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to make his face relax.
"Is that a no?" Remo asked Chiun.
"I do not know. Let us bring him out of his sad state anyway, for I know his heart is filled with words intended for our ears alone."
And Remo tapped Smith on the exact center of the forehead once, lightly. His motor functions instantly returned.
Smith sat up groaning. Blurred hands placed his eyeglasses onto his sharp patrician nose.
"You have failed CURE," he said bitterly.
"Now, is that any way to talk?"
"And you have failed your country, Remo. And you, Master Chiun, have failed your emperor. You above all know that once CURE is compromised, certain instructions are inviolate."